Thanks to a free 1-month Xbox Live Gold subscription, I snagged a couple of online Achievements last night:

Forza 3 - Selling a car online in the Auction House

Uno - Finish your first online multiplayer game

Heroes Over Europe - Fly every available plane type in the same multiplayer match

Heroes Over Europe (which I worked on) was quite a disappointment online, as there was no one playing. At all. Just me. Kinda sad, really. Also, a few of the online achievements involve having matches with 5 or more players. Considering I couldn't even get anyone else besides me to play means that I might have to give up on these ones.

Tinker is a puzzle game where you lead a robot to the exit while dealing with obstacles. I'm reminded of Adventures of Lolo on NES (video above), which isn't a bad thing. I played for thirty minutes last night, completing the tutorial levels and managing to score seven achievements in the process. Recommended, and the fact that's free doesn't hurt.

I can't believe I'm still playing this game. Not that the game is bad - I love Virtua Fighter over Tekken or Dead or Alive. But the scope of this game makes me question my sanity. Some of the achievements involve fighting and defeating the various AI players that are scattered throughout the many arcades. I'm guessing that there are over 1000 AI players... and I plan to beat every single one of them. Eventually.

I hit the 20,000 Gamerpoint mark on the weekend by finishing WWE Legends of Wrestlemania. I enjoyed it more than the standard Smackdown Vs Raw series, but it's still not a patch on the old WCW/NWO Revenge game on N64 or the even older WWF Wrestlefest arcade game. If anyone's interested in comparing, wrestling games are a very good example of how graphics have evolved throughout the years.

Only had a spare ten minutes to play last night, but managed to find the last audio log and get the associated Achievement. I've resisted listening to these logs because I wanted to hear them all in one sitting - which I can do now. You can too, if you don't have the game.

I returned to ODST to tackle some Achievements. I got the "Killing things that are new and different is good" Achievement (by killing ten Engineers - guys who I didn't even know about until I got 3/4 through campaign mode) and attempted to find all of the audio logs. Tip - If you're using a map like me, mark off the ones you find! I did the rounds and was missing two, so I went around again and still couldn't figure out which two I missed. Thank the Internet for YouTube tutorials. I've got one last audio log to find, which requires me to replay the last campaign level.

I do love me some Halo, but I think Bungie/Microsoft should have kept to the original "Halo Recon" title rather than "ODST". If anything, it sets a nice naming convention (Halo Reach being the next game.) Kinda like how many Nintendo DS games have a subtitle playing on the "D" and "S".

I finished it on the weekend. It's short and underwhelming, but not completely unplayable. The first issue with it is the story - as a prequel to the actual film, it's not particularly interesting on its own (you go a rescue some people trapped in Skynet territory and that's it.) Next issue is its difficulty - it can be quite cheap at times. Best example of that is when you're hiding behind some cover, a Terminator comes and punches you for a one-hit kill - even though its not physically close enough to do so. I liked the turret sections though - but I'm a sucker for those.

Ultimately, I did enjoy it. It reminded me of older 8-bit/16-bit game design where every enemy had a certain strategy to deal with them and you just repeated that over and over again. Games have moved on since then, but its always nice to be reminded of how things were.